I dreamed much more. But though I couldn't help dreaming, I can help recalling it all, I can keep writing it.
Yet what can I do if I don't write? I can't get to close grips with a book. The end of _Les Chouans_ is too beautiful, too sorrowful, and I've no one to talk to, save Susan. Susan has been an angel all day: but I couldn't talk to her just now. I will go to bed.
I cannot sleep. Perhaps the fire was too restless and bright.
The room is so warm that I am sitting without even a dressing-gown, just as I slipped out of bed. I have a plan of wooing sleep.
I am going to write to Ruddington. Not a reply on behalf of Susan. Not a letter that will ever be posted. Not a letter that any eye save mine shall ever see. Once, just this once, because I am sleepless, and shaken, and worn, and unhappy, I will let myself go. For half an hour, he shall be mine. His rose-leaf, my stolen rose-leaf, shall lie by my hand. To-morrow ... the fire for what I write to-night. And for me--to-morrow and all the morrows after it--no looking back to this hour, no brooding, no idle regret, nothing save the quest of forgetfulness.
This is what I write--the first and last love-letter of my life:
BELOVED,--You bid me write to you just once without distrust either of myself or of you. You bid me pour out all my heart.
I obey. Once--this once--I will speak to you as I have never spoken before, as I can never speak again.
You have seen me, in the flesh, three times, treading the solid ground, breathing the summer air. Yet you do not love me. I have seen you only in a portrait: and I love you as wildly, as eternally, as immeasurably as you believe you love poor Susan. I know it all through my soul: and, as you wrote in your first letter, there can never be any one in the world for me save you.
Your portrait was the beginning. How I can have been near your own very self those three times in England without turning to you as a flower turns to the sun, without answering you as deep answers deep, I do not know. Perhaps my heart did turn, my soul did answer. But, for my consciousness, the portrait was the beginning. And what your portrait began your letters have carried on.
You say that poor Susan's mind is even more beautiful and wonderful than poor Susan's face. Alas, how cruelly you are deceived, how rudely you must be awakened. But with Thee, beloved, it is thy mind that makes me love Thee most. Although I have wandered only a few steps along its margin, I know that a long lifetime would not suffice me to explore that goodly land with its sunny fields, its merry brooks, its great deeps, its peaks piercing the clouds of heaven.